Mysteries in the Dead of Night
by openPandora'sBox
Summary: It's Dr.Keller's first night on Atlantis.When she finds it impossible to fall asleep,she sets out to explore the city and runs into one Dr.Rodney McKay. Written for Unwavering:McKeller LJ Community's "Meet-Cute" Challenge.


Disclaimer: I do not own SGA (the show), the characters, or the pretty little spaceships. Nor do I own the pop-culture reference hidden within this fic. I do own this plot bunny. Don't sue me!

A/N: This an entry for the "Meet-Cute" Challenge set up at the Unwavering: McKeller LJ Community. I am, apparantly, incapable of writing short fics. Sigh...

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Mysteries in the Dead of Night

It was her first night on Atlantis and Dr. Jennifer Keller wasn't falling asleep.

First, she'd tried counting sheep, but repeatedly losing count somewhere around the 600 mark had only served to aggravate her, not lull her into unconsciousness.

Next, she'd thought back to Professor Tulp's anatomy lectures during her undergraduate years. Those memories had served her well on countless other sleepless nights, but now they only inspired fresh thought. Was that ancient man still teaching, she wondered? Nobody had been able to pinpoint his exact age - popular opinion had it around seventy at the time - but the rumour had been that the near-deafness and semi-senility had all been a front to keep the University heads from insisting on research papers. Some students had even sworn up and down, left and right, some even on their theses, that they'd caught glimpses of a man resembling their aged professor jogging at the crack of dawn. Admittedly, they'd been bleary eyed from all-nighters - either study-induced or party-induced - for every supposed sighting, but the "Tulp Mystery" had been a popular one.

"You've got to be kidding me," Jennifer muttered. She threw back the thin cotton sheets and stole a glance at her alarm clock. 2:13 am, it read. Jennifer scowled at the soft blue glow of the display and threw her head back into her down-filled pillow. Twice. And then once more.

She decided to lay perfectly still, tune out all the thoughts in her head. She had too many anyway. The dead of night was supposed to peaceful, calm, relaxing. She was supposed to be sleeping and dreaming right now, not thinking back to senseless rumours from her college days.

"Dead of night?" She mouthed, eyes still closed. Who came up with that turn of phrase? How was that in any way peaceful, or calming, or relaxing, especially here in the Pegasus galaxy? You had Wraith waiting to suck your life through your chest and Replicators trying to take over the city and killing innocent people throughout the galaxy. Not to mention millions of undiscovered bacteria, viruses, and parasites just waiting for a susceptible person to come meandering along, oblivious to the dangerous of simply breathing in foreign air.

Jennifer's eyes shot wide open. "Holy shit!" She sat up in her bed and tossed her legs over the side, hands braced on either side of her body. There was no way she was getting any sleep at all tonight.

She slowly pushed herself up and walked over to the window on the opposite wall. Slowly Jennifer pulled it to the side, stopping halfway, almost expecting an alarm to go off somewhere in the city alerting everyone of a possible escape. Quickly deciding that she had, in fact, lost all her marbles, Jennifer pushed the window open fully and breathed in a lungful of fresh, salty air.

She allowed the soft sound of waves crashing against the piers to soothe her nerves. She stared, mesmerized by the thousands of tiny lights lining the piers and buildings of Atlantis, and waited for her lids to grow heavy, for sleep to claim her, and her bed to beckon her back. Wasn't it proven that ocean sounds calm the mind and make people sleepy?

Beyond frustrated, Jennifer forcefully blew out a gust of air and pushed away from the window. If it was, then she was turning out to be the exception to that rule because it wasn't working. She was only being further reminded of exactly how far from home she truly was. Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin did not come replete with ocean sounds to fall asleep by.

Deeming sleep a lost cause for the night, Jennifer decided that the best thing to do was to familiarize herself with the beast that scared her. Now. While there was no one awake to mock her senseless fears.

She quickly exchanged her customary sleeping attire, shorts and a tank top, for the Atlantis uniform she'd been wearing earlier in the day. Between tours of the city, rounds in the infirmary, meeting with Dr. Beckett's staff, and marginally familiarizing herself with her new surroundings, she hadn't taken the time to unpack. Wearing the uniform was probably a good idea anyway. She didn't want to give the military guards any reason to suspect she was anything other than a flesh-and-blood human.

Fully dressed, hair pulled back in a ponytail, Jennifer waved her hand at the control panel and watched, fascinated, as the door slid open. Looking first left then right, she hesitantly stepped out into the hallway and jumped a fraction of an inch off the ground when the door swished shut behind her. Atlantis' way of telling her to just get on with it already?

Turning right, she placed one foot in front of the other, walking slowly towards the transporter. More like propelling herself forwards, she thought wryly.

"Must move forwards, not backwards. Upwards, not forwards. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."

Jennifer halted in her tracks a few feet from the transporter. Pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes, she turned her head from side to side. Convinced no one had heard her utter that last bit out loud, she stepped into the transporter and selected a location at random. Apparently, she would be heading towards the science labs. It was just as well. Maybe familiarizing herself with Ancient technology would help her acclimatize to Atlantis more readily.

Shaking off the residual tingling from the short trip, Jennifer began her walk down the long corridor - hesitantly at first - but with every step she was increasingly convinced nothing would jump out of a lab and rearrange her molecules. The fact was, if she'd been expecting any kind excitement at all, then she was sorely disappointed. The place seemed to be deserted; the hallways were eerily silent, and each lab suspiciously empty.

She kept moving, occasionally poking her head into an open room and surveying the surroundings. What she saw fascinated her and incited her scientific mind to mad speculation. She spied devices she couldn't even begin to describe, let alone speculate as to their functions. She caught glimpses of large whiteboards covered in numbers and symbols her basic knowledge of advanced math could only partly identify.

Then she saw something that made her stop walking abruptly. She stood in the doorway of one of the more out-of-the-way labs. The room itself was nondescript; it held the same large screens, tablet computers, metal tables, swiveling stools, and assorted tools as any other lab. What caught Jennifer's attention, and what she assumed was the subject of study, was the incredibly intriguing yet exceptionally repellant object sitting squarely in the center of the room.

Disgusting was the first word that came to her mind, but she stepped towards it anyway. It looked like part of a small ship – the rear part of a Wraith Dart if she was recalling the mission reports correctly. One side looked like it had housed a cockpit of sorts, while the end closest to her, and what she could see inside of it, looked like nothing she'd ever seen in her life - it was made of organic tissue. One long tendril of organic matter snaked out of the Dart and onto the floor. She followed its trail with her eyes, up to a small square table nestled near the rear of the Dart. Her gaze rested, mesmerized, on the improbably beautiful object braced securely on the tabletop. It was like nothing she'd ever have associated with the Wraith. For one, it didn't make her want to run away screaming. For another, it was oddly crystal-like and, at the risk of sounding utterly girly, rather shaped like a diamond.

She hadn't realized that she'd moved to stand within a foot of the table. Her hand had risen of its own accord and was now hovering, inches away from the surface of the device.

"Do you usually make a habit of touching strange, possibly lethal, objects in places you have no business being?"

Jennifer snapped her hand back to her body, her heart ready to leap out of her chest. She spun around to face the doorway, apology at the ready, and met the cold blue stare of one Dr. Rodney McKay.

"I didn't -" she started, brown eyes wide in surprise.

"You didn't think?" Rodney snapped. "Hmmm, yes. I can see how assessing this sort of situation might be hard when faced with something so obviously bright and shiny, but do try and limit your quest to discover inventive ways to commit suicide to outside my labs."

Rodney didn't have time to pander to the hyper-emotional sensitivities of the opposite sex, right at this moment. He'd just watched as a nearly ten thousand year-old man held one of his teammates hostage. Had stood by, helpless, as his two other teammates had been nearly asphyxiated by a second ten thousand year-old man, this one seeking vengeance, and – to top it all off – they had all nearly died aboard a retrofitted asteroid as it fell out of its geo-synchronous orbit and began disintegrating in the planet's atmosphere.

Now he had one millennia-old device modified from Wraith technology, an actual piece of Wraith tech from an experience he'd rather have forgotten altogether, absolutely no data on how the former had been modified from the latter, nearly a thousand questions on the subject, and now a crazy blonde standing in his lab in the dead of night insisting on touching foreign objects that could kill her. Well, it wouldn't do anything to her and he knew that. But she didn't, and that was the point.

Jennifer felt heat rise to her cheeks as the conceited astrophysicist summarily dismissed her attempt at an explanation. Part of her wanted to apologize profusely and scamper away like a chastised child. But she'd learned to push aside those thoughts at about the time she'd realized that being several years younger than most of her colleagues meant maintaining at least a façade of confidence as often as possible – that had been fifteen years ago at the age of fourteen. Instead, she listened to the part that remembered the personnel file she'd memorized and the mission reports she'd been required to flip through. One mission report had specifically sprung to mind when she'd gotten a better look at the Wraith device and the particulars of said report had been interesting enough to stick. There was a reason she had gotten so far, so fast in life and in her chosen career. Being stupid wasn't it. Neither was being a pushover.

"It wasn't-"

"I don't know if things have changed much in the Milky Way," Rodney sharply interrupted, dismissing her with a sharp look. "But here in Pegasus it's pretty much standard that what you don't know will kill you."

Briskly stepping around the mystery blonde, Rodney was halfway into his seat before the 'mystery' part of his mental description of this woman fully dawned on him.

"And unless I've started hiring people by disregarding mental faculties and assessing them solely on physical attributes, you're not supposed to be here." He didn't bother turning around to watch her leave, instead focusing his attention on the diagnostic he'd initiated prior to setting out on a fruitless search for coffee.

"That's the rear end of a Wraith Dart you have sitting over there," Jennifer retorted, beckoning with her head in its general direction.

Rodney remained silent and continued tapping away at his keyboard.

Determined, Jennifer pursed her lips and folded her arms against her chest, a devilish gleam in her tawny eyes.

"One year ago, yourself and a Lieutenant Laura Cadman were captured by a Wraith Dart on a survey mission of a planet that had been recently culled by the Wraith."

The incessant tapping ceased. Rodney stilled.

Jennifer allowed herself a small smirk and stepped back towards the Wraith device settled on the table before continuing, "The internal power supply was quickly running out so Dr. Radek Zelenka, under orders from Colonel John Sheppard, successfully rematerialized you after several Marines managed to shoot down the Dart."

Rodney's shoulders tensed, but he made no move to turn around.

Jennifer let out a frustrated sigh and rested her hand on the corner of the small table, inches away from the edge of the device.

"Unfortunately, you weren't the only thing he managed to rematerialize. Lt. Cadman-"

Rodney suddenly swiveled around, glaring venomously through eyes cold as ice. The basics of that mission were in a case file that any personnel on Atlantis could get a hold of, but the details regarding him and Cadman were highly classified.

"I know how the story ends, thank you," Rodney shot back. He glanced from the hand she rested nonchalantly next to the disabled device to the tiny smile playing at her lips, slightly confused. There were only a select few privy to that sort of information. She was either a new high-ranking military type or she'd read his medical file. Rodney narrowed his eyes at her further, his mind working quickly to ascertain her position in Atlantis' pecking order.

Jennifer was starting to feel uncomfortable under the scrutiny of that blue-eyed stare. She wanted to squirm. She wanted to move her hand away from that awful device. She did neither. Smile gone, she returned that glare with one of her own, before suddenly coming to her senses. Antagonizing Atlantis' chief scientist wasn't exactly the best way to endear herself to the exiting crew of this expedition. Although, she had heard that Rodney McKay wasn't exactly known for endearing himself to anyone either.

She let out a soft sigh, pulled her hand away from the table and clasping them both in front of her. "You're wondering who I am. And you're right, I'm not exactly supposed to be here." Jennifer shrugged and sighed again. Unable to look him in the eye, she settled for staring at the screen over his right shoulder.

Rodney's rigid posture softened minutely and he glared with a little less force. "You're the new doctor," he stated as a matter of course.

Jennifer's gaze returned to meet Rodney's and she let the small smile return to her face. "Dr. Jennifer Keller. Trauma surgeon," she supplied.

"Butcher," Rodney scoffed. But he stopped glaring and his shoulders relaxed once more. "Carson has you working shifts your first night here? Maybe I underestimated him." Mystery solved, he turned back to his work. He lifted one hand to rub at tired eyes and desperately wished for a cup of coffee. "The infirmary is up a level, close to the Command Room." That was about as far as his courtesy extended.

"I'm not scheduled." Jennifer rolled her eyes at his back and almost stuck out her tongue. Something about this conversation was making her feel ridiculously juvenile. She bit back a laugh, stepping closer to Rodney's workstation.

"I couldn't sleep," she admitted. "First night here and whatnot. I thought maybe counting sheep would do the trick at first, but that was a bust."

Rodney heard her voice just a touch louder than before. She was closer. Why was she closer? Why was this making him uncomfortable?

"And usually Professor Tulp's lectures do the trick, but again, nothing." She was now standing directly to his left, which didn't make sense. Cruelty was often a sure-fire way to get rid of any nuisance.

"Tulp?" Rodney heard himself ask. He peered at her through the corner of his eye, watched her turn to face him, hip leaning on the edge of the table. He quickly shifted his gaze back to the screen in front of him.

"Weird, I know. And oddly fitting. He was my anatomy professor." Jennifer swiftly lifted a hand to her mouth as she tried to stifle a yawn.

Rodney turned his head slightly towards her and quirked an eyebrow. "Looks like you won't be having problems with that insomnia any longer," he remarked, hoping she'd take the hint and make herself scarce. His plan to have this diagnostic completed and in report form by morning was rapidly falling apart. Her distracting him wasn't helping matters.

Jennifer glanced down at her wrist, her eyes widening slightly at how quickly the time had passed without her notice. "It's already after four. My shift starts in less than two hours, so there's no point." She raised her eyebrows right back at him. "What's your excuse?"

Rodney straightened on his stool and flexed his fingers over the keyboard. "Someone has to be conscious when our hordes of enemies come raining down on us in the dead of night."

Dead of night. How appropriate, Rodney thought wryly.

Jennifer frowned at his choice of words and blew out a soft breath. "So," she said slowly. "Saving the city and whatnot?" a slight teasing note in her tone.

A tiny smirk made it's way into the corner of Rodney's mouth. Recognition was never not appreciated. He was about to tell her as much, when a soft crackle sounded in his left ear and he cast his eyes to the ceiling in frustration.

"McKay." It was Sheppard.

"What?"

"Control Room," came the short response from the Colonel.

"Right. Of course." Rodney threw up his hands in exasperation. "Because I have nothing else better to do than traipse through Atlantis at everyone's beck and call."

"Now, McKay."

Jennifer couldn't quite manage to stifle her chuckle this time and it came out in a series of scoffs and coughs - very graceless.

Rodney stood up slowly, muscles protesting from sheer exhaustion, and trudged to the doorway, tablet in hand. He turned back towards the doctor, eyes on the floor, both hands grasping the tablet in front of his torso like a shield.

"Give it a couple of weeks." He said it so quickly and softly Jennifer almost hadn't caught his words. She raised her eyebrows in silent question.

"Give it a couple of weeks before this place," he waved his arms around for a few seconds before pulling them quickly back, pulling the tablet back in to his stomach. "Before it seems more like home." Uncomfortable with her astonished stare, he quickly turned to leave.

"Rodney." Jennifer's soft voice stopped him. He turned again and met her tired eyes this time, saw her shy smile. "You're not half as bad as your reputation had led me to believe, you know."

This time he was the one with the astonished stare. He stood, rooted to the spot. He watched as she walked towards him and graced him with a beaming smile. His eyes followed her as she walked past him, down the corridor, around the corner, and out of sight. Dumbfounded was the only word that described how he felt at that precise moment.

"McKay!" Came the impatient demand in his ear.

Annoyed was the word that came to mind now. Him, not Sheppard. Sheppard could go rot in a Hive ship for all he cared.

"Unless we suddenly have Asgard tech on Atlantis," Rodney impatiently fired back. "Walking does tend to take some time, Sheppard."

Rodney spared one last glance towards the Wraith device and the screen still running the diagnostic he'd hoped to have finished by now. He muttered a few choice words and shook his head before walking away from that particular mystery for the time being. His time hadn't been completely wasted, he thought as he stepped into the transporter just several feet away from that particular lab. He should've told Jennifer it was there. But just because he was the leading expert on all things astrophysical in two galaxies didn't mean he also wasn't male.

Rodney smirked as he stabbed at the transporter's console with his finger. Maybe he hadn't solved the mystery of the Wraith device just yet, but he had solved the 'Mystery of the 'Crazy' Blonde' and any day when Rodney McKay unraveled any mystery even remotely involving the opposite sex, was a good day.

The transporter doors slid open to reveal the frowning, foot-tapping presence of a clearly aggravated Colonel.

"Good morning, Sheppard." Rodney stepped around the taller man and started towards the Control Room.

John followed after Rodney, taking a few seconds to pettily glare at the other man's turned back before speaking, "We just got word from the team we sent to scout M2R 422. Looks like the Replicators got there before we did."

Day, not so good anymore.

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I hope you enjoyed it. Either way, let me know. Oh, and let's play, "Spot the pop-culture and art history references". Don't ask me what inspired me to put them in becuase I have no idea. I'm weird that way.

Read and Review, please.


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